Kikkan Randall of the USA, a medal favorite, came up short in the individual sprint free. / Kyle Terada, USA TODAY Sports

by Erik Brady, USA TODAY Sports

by Erik Brady, USA TODAY Sports

KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia - We see the gold medal performances and the fantastic finishes and the golden smiles again and again on TV. We'll see them all over again in the gauzy montages as the Games come to a close.

This is the flip side of joy, what it feels like when the dream disappears.

It looks like the hollowed-out stare in Kikkan Randall's eyes as she walked up to the mixed zone Tuesday, where reporters waited to ask her what had just gone terribly wrong. She'd come into the day as a favorite to medal, maybe even gold, in women's cross country individual sprint free and make American history in the sport. She walked out an also-ran.

Randall offered a series of explanations for the inexplicable, how she'd finished fourth in her quarterfinal heat. Her legs got a little stiff at the end. She didn't get the lunge that could have made up the five-hundredths of a second she needed. She couldn't find that final gear that made her a world champion.

"It's tough," she said. "That's sport, right? You try your whole life for something like this and it's over in 2½ minutes."

And here she exhaled deeply.

The thought echoed something her mother had said hours earlier. "It's incredible to be here, but this is very stressful for me," Deborah Randall said. "This is what she has worked for all her life. But you never know in sport, do you?"

Her mother sat in the stands with a group of 10 family and friends. They wore homemade "Kikkanimal" shirts and hats with images of her daughter that showed half of her face and half of a tiger's, like the comedy and tragedy masks. The image is meant to represent Roar, the Katy Perry song that is Randall's theme song. "And the eye of the tiger," her mother said.

Randall's mother and father and brother and sister and two aunts and a cousin with a significant other and two family friends made the trip. One friend they met at home in Alaska is from Ukraine, and he is serving as their interpreter here.

Randall appreciated all of them. "It's always great to have that support around you," she said, "when it goes well, and when it doesn't."

She didn't get to talk to them immediately after the race. She did talk to her husband at the finish. She doesn't remember what was said.

"I think I was kind of speechless," she said. "It has to sink in a little bit."

There is hope ahead. She will race with her American teammates in the 4x5k relay Saturday and the team sprint classic on Feb. 19. She holds tight to those races as if they are a life preserver.

"We've got a couple of more shots," she said. "So I'm just going to put today in a box and move on to the next one."

"My heart broke a little bit," Diggins said. "Of course I want to race well for me but mostly I was hoping the best for her. I was hoping she would be able to fulfill her dreams."

The top two finishers in quarterfinal heats move on. The two best times among those who finish third or fourth in heats move on too. They're called lucky losers. Randall missed out by five-hundredths of a second, an unlucky loser, a lifetime of work versus the blink of an eye.

"Seven-hundredths of a second is an incredibly close margin," Randall said, unaware the margin was even closer, "and I'm sure I will be reliving those moments hundreds of times in my head."

And then she walked away, carrying her skis and her poles, and the burden of a day gone wrong.